Catch Up

July 29 2007

It’s been a week since I wrote last. Things this week have been pretty busy and any free moment I was attempting to study for my first language assessment, which was yesterday. I’ll try to give a quick recap of the week.

Last Sunday I woke up did a little studying and then headed into town to attend an arts and crafts workshop a few AZ 4’s put on. (AZ4 is the class of Peace Corps volunteers that started last year we are AZ5’s) After the workshop I headed down town and hang out with some other volunteers, which turned into about 25 volunteers. We all had a really good time but got our wrists slapped later in the week. We attracted a bunch of attention and a few girls were drinking, which is ok but they want them to keep it a bit more discrete.

Monday and Tuesday were pretty normal just school stuff. Then Wednesday we had our second hub day where all of our class comes together again and we have all sorts of boring lectures on health safety and security. This time though we had the second in command of the embassy come and talk to us about the state departments view about Azerbaijan. It was a really good discussion where he addressed all the real issues and held nothing back. We found out some really interesting things from him that made me even more glad I’m here.

We had some Azeri’s in the room while he was talking and many of them got offended, but I think that was good. The culture here tends to stick with the, if you don’t have anything good to say don’t say anything at all. Then, the media is intimidated by the government with reporters being thrown in jail on charges of slander or being murdered. So the information many people get is not the most accurate and the people that work for PC are some of the best and the brightest with many of them moving on to work in government. So hopefully it will help enlighten them to the understanding that change needs to happen and they can help make that happen.

The next few days I just prepared for my big test on Saturday. The test turned out to be the biggest BS I’ve ever experienced. The tester came in and asked us questions about things we hadn’t even learned yet and talked about ninety miles an hour. The test was recorded so it could be played back to all the LCF’s and they would be able to debate on what rating we should receive. During the test because she was talking so fast I would ask her to repeat what she said, but instead of saying it again or slower she would write it down on a piece of paper in English! Normally, This would be great I wouldn’t complain too much if a tester was trying to blatantly help me cheat. The problem was that her handwriting was so terrible I couldn’t read a word she wrote! So I would ask her again in Azeri to repeat herself and she would just point at what she wrote again. So I just started to answer the questions with things I knew. She could have asked me what I did yesterday and I would answer with “My family is large. I have many brothers and sisters.” And then go on about my family or what foods I liked. It was so bad that all we could do was laugh about it afterwards because it happened to everyone. My rating ended up being novice high which was one step below the highest score people got at intermediate low. In order to pass PST we have to end with a rating of intermediate mid.

As soon as the test was over and we laughed for a while I packed up and went to Baku!!